Wednesday, October 29, 2014

I Drank The Cider

I Drank The Cider

I am not afraid,
no longer afraid of all
the posturing toads
who would be dragons.
In fact, bring me true dragons
and I will bop them,
drop them down and shut
their stinky mouths, sew them shut
with golden sinew.
That's the end of that.

October 12, 2010 2:23 PM

Remarkable. Have had a difficult day in many ways including my feeling good and at the end felt I needed to take the easiest way out posting to my blog. This showed up. It is a poem I wrote over four years ago but it fits my heart right now.

I guess I don't really think Keanu is a stinky dragon but his mouth is about right. Right now for me somebody else is. None of your business who.

Normally I would have posted on a site called Three Word Wednesday. I was not up to writing something new today.

This is happening more and more. I can see I am descending the slope a little over months and years. This is totally normal for older fellahs, which I am.

When I titled this poem, I was thinking of the American slang, "I drank the kool-aid" which of course refers to the Jim Jones debacle at Jonestown where the group suicide cyanide was administered by kool-aid. Hundreds died. This phrase then tries to identify how if others are trying to trick you, you help them by willingly taking the trick in. Or if they are not trying to trick you, then you are an even bigger fool.

The whole scene alludes to one of those "if only...then I would have been better off" deals as well. Keep your fricken mouth shut, Hileman! I will not ever go to the other alternative of censoring myself as I speak, at least not according to someone else's taste. But not speaking is do-able.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.